The Singing Sea
by rhoddlet
Summary: Harry, Hermione, and summer. Hermione loves Harry; Harry loves summer.


Title: The Singing Sea  
  
Author: rhoddlet  
  
Rating: PG-13 for a vague sexual description.  
  
Summary: Harry, summer, and Hermione. Hermione loves Harry; Harry loves the summer.  
  
Harry Potter/Hermione Granger; referenced Harry Potter/Ron Weasley, implied Harry Potter/And A Special Guest. Harry is a slut, I know.  
  
Continuing the long tradition of cribbing titles, the title of this little piece is from a track by The Divine Ms. Yoko Kanno from Cowboy Bebop OST. More author's notes at the end.  
  
*  
  
we're only made of sand, water, and stone  
  
we're only made of joy and make-believe . . .  
  
we're only made of sky and it's true  
  
If you still believe in joy  
  
even if the world is full of pain  
  
we can blast away inside, away inside  
  
there's no reason to doubt it  
  
you can still believe in joyjoy.  
  
*  
  
Hermione wakes up with a crease in her face, pre-dawn light on her shoulders, and toner smudged on her cheek from the cheap photocopy of the Hymn of the Nassenes that she's been working from. The bulb's burnt out, she thinks, and raises her face off the kitchen table and pushes back her chair to go get one . Then she runs into a solid block of warm -- almost hot -- flesh.  
  
Shoulder, collarbone, raggedy black hair, those funny eyes she knows are normally green but are grey at this time of the day.  
  
Hermione loves Greece. She love her parents, she loves hot weather with cold drinks and old bookstores and Crookshanks and Dumbledore, but oh, dear god, she loves Harry. Sometimes, she suspects that she loves Harry more than she loves all those other things put together -- and sometimes she knows she does. It's one of those realizations that teenage girls wake up knowing, but Hermione knows that this isn't something that's going to go away when she falls asleep tonight. It sits on her shoulders and whispers in her heart; it's dissolved in her blood and moves in the chambers of her heart. Sometimes, she'll sit on the porch and watch Harry walk up to the house, and she can't breathe because she loves him so much.  
  
"You're up early," Harry says while he unscrews the lid of a bottle of peanut butter.  
  
"So're you," Hermione says.  
  
Another older, wiser part of her knows that love like this is just the slightest bit unhealthy. The younger, smarter part of her knows that if she didn't love Harry like this, she wouldn't look for an answer this hard, and all of her knows that if somebody doesn't come up with an answer to the question that hasn't been asked, then Harry's going to die. And if Voldemort blots Harry out, Hermione's pretty sure she's going to be next, not only because she's one of those nasty little Mudbloods but because her heart will probably explode from grief and pain and rage.  
  
So she studies almost out of self-preservation, and when she thinks about it that way, her obsession doesn't seem so bizarre anymore. Every living thing wants to keep on living -- nothing wants to die.  
  
And it's funny. She didn't love Harry this badly before he came to Greece with her, but there's something about the reality of lying next to Harry on these hot white sands and watching a sea that's the same dark color as those funny, funny eyes. Harry seems. . . realer than real, these days. Hogwarts and snow and rain are just memories; Ron and classes and OWLs are dreams from a long-past rainy age. This is life, Harry is life, and there seem to be three people in the universe: her, Harry, and Voldemort, and damned if she's going to let Voldemort be the last one standing.  
  
Harry's realer than real. His skin's so much warmer than everything else, and the way he stands now, half-lit in the low grey light with patches of light on his chest and thighs where the light comes from between the kitchen curtains. Funny little bare chest -- Hermione knows enough about the birds and bees to know about chest hair and the order of things in puberty, but Harry seems to have dispensed with all the inconvenient things like squeaky voices and ratty goatees and dark chest hair and skipped to being lithe and tall with long lean muscles. If there's fat on his body, it's probably underneath his fingernails.  
  
"Couldn't sleep," Harry says. "And the tide's going out a bit early, so I thought I might as well pack lunch and just get some more time on the boat. It's the middle of August already."  
  
Harry, unsurprisingly, is absolutely obsessed with sailing.  
  
He says it's the closest thing to flying he'll get to do all summer, but you think that, in a way, he's even more obsessed with sailing that he is with Quidditch. Sitting on a broomstick six hours a day would give Hermione and anyone the sorest ass in the world, but Harry leaves for the boat after breakfast, doesn't come back until the sun is too bright on the water for him to see anymore, lounges about the house all afternoon, then gets out on the boat at twilight for one last sail on the cooling waters. Lately, he's taken to spending the afternoons on some deserted island or beach, packing his lunch with him.  
  
The boat actually came along with house. It's been in the shed all these years since Hermione inherited her mother's seasickness, and her father isn't really that much of a sportsman. He'll take it out to go fishing once in a while, but that's about it. When Harry came along though, Hermione's father felt obliged to take him out for a fatherly fishing trip. They hadn't caught very many fish, but Harry had fallen in love with the sea, and discovered, much to his delight, a tiny sailboat in the back of the shed which none of you had even known was there.  
  
Harry hadn't decided to come visit you until the second to last day of the term, before the Charms exam, when a letter from the Dursley's came. Dudley apprently was inviting a friend home for part of the holidays, and Aunt Petunia didn't want Harry underfoot while Dudley played with the Headmaster's son. And then the Dursleys were going on vacation for a month, and weren't sure when they were coming back, and thieves like Harry obviously couldn't be trusted not to steal things, but they were going somewhere where people would notice a revolting little creature like him so. . .  
  
Harry had been, more or less, evicted.  
  
"Oughta come live with me for a summer," Ron had said, reading the letter over his shoulder as they ate lunch. "You could have Bill and Charlie's old room, and Mum's been bugging me to have you over again, saying she didn't like that picture of you in the Prophet and that you need fattening up."  
  
Harry was silent as he looked at the letter.  
  
"You could come live me," Hermione had offered, not really expecting him to say anything. The pattern was that Hermione and Ron both invited him over for holidays, breaks, anniversaries, family occasions, toilet plumbing, and Harry would go to Ron's house and send Hermione rather rambly letters telling you how much fun he was having with the Weasleys and how much Quidditch practice he was getting. "We're going to Greece for a while, but my parents would love having you around."  
  
Harry had put the letter on his empty plate and looked at Hermione, the funniest expression in his eyes behind the glass.  
  
Ron had suddenly looked away at the floor, and Hermione's heart did a sudden flop in her chest.  
  
Ron loves Harry the way Hermione loves Harry -- not the way Hermione loved him before this summer, as this low, constant kind of buzz in her bones, but the way she loves him this summer, like she loves breathing and seeing and thinking. Hermione suspects that Ron's loved Harry this way forever, for years and years, and she's sure that it's come to more than just sweet looks and showers in the boy's locker room.  
  
But Harry doesn't love him that way or any other way besides a friend, and at the end, it almost seems like Harry doesn't even love him that way.  
  
Hermione's puzzled this much out. It has to do with Charlie dying, she knows, and it has to do with the fact that Harry keeps snogging other people and with the fact that Ron can't play Quidditch this year because he grew too much and his knees are too weak.  
  
Ron loves Harry. Harry doesn't love Ron, and Hermione wonders whether it has to do with the nightmares that Harry had all at the beginning of summer before they left for Greece.  
  
That's the setting, the situation, and it strikes you, as Hermione, every time you see him -- this morning, last night, the day before that, the day you were walking home from the village in the twilight.  
  
Corfu is almost disturbingly safe in the summmertime. It was a big resort in the seventies, you hear, but most of the big villas have fallen into disrepair and little cottages are cheap, which is why your parents bought a place here. And you're walking home from the library, in the dusty road, as twilight starts on the horizon. You've spent all day Floo'ing in and out of all the famous wizarding bookshops in Greece, trying to find a place with a copy of the Hymn of the Nasseenes because the photocopy you've got from the one at the Sorbonne is really bad. The letters are smudgy and give the Translation spell absolute fits, although part of the problem is probably the fact that you've rigged a Turkish translation spell to translate ancient Syrian with bits of Latin mixed in.  
  
So you're walking home on this winding mountain road that runs by the sea, with the dusk starting to settle around your shoulders, and then, down on the beach, you see a little sail boat pulled up onto the sand. There's a campfire, too, and if you squint, you recognize the name Calypso stenciled on the prow.  
  
It's Harry's boat, and you're just about to go down and say hi and maybe brave the ocean for a ride back to the house with Harry. He'd probably be thrilled to talk about sailing with somebody, and it'd be nice, a soft cruise into the bay -- but then you saw a flash of silver and. . . Well.  
  
There Harry was, pressed up against the black rocks, and there was this boy down in front of him with hair so blonde as to be white, shining in the twilight, and with his face buried between Harry's legs.  
  
Boy or an eleven year old girl that was taller than Harry, and since Harry's six foot and not a pedophile, you're betting on it being boy. Harry's age, too, maybe a little older and long-legged even though he was kneeling in the sand and some kind of tourist because you could see that he was wearing some kind of collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khakis.  
  
Off-island boy. The native boys go barefoot and barechested in the summer and are browner than nuts -- Harry, in fact, looks a lot like the native boys. You could barely see him, in fact, brown against the black rock in the fading light, but when he opened his mouth to moan, his teeth flashed.  
  
Now, today, in this grey half-morning, the ocean's moving outside the kitchen window: the house is right next to the sea. If you walk go out the door, and there's a little crag of worn black rock dotted with little pink rock anenomes and then it's the sea, grey and green with little white caplets in the twlight. You can stand on the porch and watch Harry come up the rock path from the beach down below. At first, he's just a black shape against the dark blue sea, and then as he comes up the side of the cliff, you start to pick out shoulders and head and legs. Then there's a moment when he's standing at the top of the path, outlined against the sea with the wind lifting his hair. And then he steps into the yellow light from the house, and your heart contracts, painfully, when you watch his head resolve into his face, and you see that he's got a string of fish in his right hand for dinner.  
  
That night, you watched him come home to you after that boy.  
  
It made you feel strange and wife-like, watching him come home, which you do every night now. And since your parents off in Knossos, looking at the Minoan ruins, you are the only one who watches him come home.  
  
He took the fish he'd brought home and stuffed them with goat cheese and herbs from the back garden, then set them to baking in the oven, and the two of you have them on the porch, in the cool Greek night, with a little bit of wine and some buttered rice and greens. For dessert, grapes as big as your thumb and sweet like honey. The juice ran down your fingers, and you watched Harry suck on his fingers and run his tongue across his knuckles and wrist.  
  
It's cold outside, so you had goosebumps running up and down your arms.  
  
"Fish're even better when roast them on the fire," he informed you after a particularly long suck on one knuckle. "They're crispy and almost burnt outside, but the inside is really hot and really, really. . . well. Good, you know?"  
  
You stare at him for a minute.  
  
It's times like these you feel so much older than him. The hope of the world, and this summer, his vocabulary's degenerated so that he knows about three hundred words, two hundred and fifty of which have to do with sailing.  
  
This isn't entirely fair, by the way. You know he's teaching himself Homeric Greek so he can read The Odyssey -- you'd read chunks of it to him under a Translation spell when he was sick at the beginning of the summer, and afterwards, he decided that he wanted to be able to learn it for himself. He takes his grammar books and passages out into the boat with him when he leaves in the morning.  
  
You made tea in the kitchen, then, and you brang it out to Harry. The two of you drank tea and talked about birds and sea and Ithaca in the summer night. The stars smiled down at you; the wind moved through the front yard and the olive trees on the hills behind you. There's a lemon tree in the corner of the yard: it's a pretty big tree with long thorns and slender leaves that reflect moonlight in the way of the species. It's been blooming all summer, and you can smell it at night when the wind isn't too strong, this soft sweetness mixed with the salt from the sea.  
  
It's a beautiful smell -- you can't get it in England where the sea is always cold and where lemon trees won't grow because it's entirely too cold. You're about to say something to Harry about lemon trees throughout magical history, but he's fallen asleep on the wicker arm of the porch chair, and you watch him for a moment.  
  
You've done this every night for a week, now, ever since you walked home from the village that one day. Dinner, tea, the wind moving the sea and the trees underneath the moonlight, with Harry falling asleep with you.  
  
And, as you've done every day this week and every day since the beginning of the summer, when you fell in love with Harry, you go into the kitchen to read and read and think about the answer to the question that Voldemort hasn't asked yet until you wake up six hours later, when Harry's padding around in the kitchen, making himself peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  
  
"Couldn't sleep," Harry says. "And the tide's going out a bit early, so I thought I might as well pack lunch and just get some more time on the boat. It's almost August already."  
  
August. The two of you are going back to England in a two and a half weeks, and school pretty soon after that. You'll have wasted your summer if you don't have a better idea of what the thefts of the Cup of Bells, the Belt of Uthor and the British Royal Museum's copy of the Hymn of the Nassenes mean. Wasted. Voldemort's up to something; you can feel it in your bones, and it's just entirely too perfect that the Ophites believed that God was the demon and the serpent was gnossis. You read about the Serpent offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Paradise, and you can almost feel the universe moving in the ancient Syrian, even through the Translation spell you've put on yourself. It's here. This is the answer, and if only you could see it. . .  
  
"I'll be back for dinner, 'Mione," Harry sings out as he leaves. You blink after him for a moment, then go to make yourself a pot of tea before you go back to reading in the lonely house.  
  
These days so full of color and smell are nothing. This is the hard truth of the universe, and you will beat Voldemort. You will. For your sake, for your parents and for Dumbledore, and above all, for Harry's sake.  
  
Voldemort taught Harry about loneliness. Ron taught Harry about friendship. This mystery boy with silver hair and these beautiful, sunlit days on the sea have taught Harry about joy and forgetfulness, so you're -- you're going to be damned if you're going to let your contribution stand at friendship and a couple solved schoolhouse mysteries and this summer away from the Dursleys. Damned if you're going to do that.  
  
You are going to teach Harry about salvation.  
  
*  
  
end  
  
*  
  
Yes, there is too really such a thing as the Ophites/Nassenes. They were a second century Gnostic cult which held the serpent as the supreme being as it was the holder of true knowledge and believed that water was the element of life. It works rather well, doesn't it?  
  
Descriptions of Corfu and the Greek islands taken from "The Rich Man's Guide to Europe" by Charles Graves, brother of That Famous Poet. I don't know if it's still a big resort, but for my purposes, I chose to make it a rather quiet little backwater.  
  
This's a sequel of sorts to Waterworld and Let's see if that's true or not, and there's a little sequel to this that I'm working You don't have to read Waterworld to know what's going on in this little story, but they're all part of a universe that I'm fiddling together.  
  
And yes, the mystery lover is everybody's favorite white-haired prat, Draco Malfoy. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm absolutely obsessed by the idea of Draco Malfoy wearing a pink collared shirt and khakis with flip- flops. Does the wizarding world have J Crew? I can't imagine that they'd pass up that kind of market, and Draco Malfoy was born to wear two hundred dollars worth of clothes to go kneeling in the sand.  
  
And yes. Goddammit, I know it takes years to learn how to sail properly, but isn't it supposed to take more than five minutes to learn how to ride a broom? Ne? 


End file.
